... And New World Meets Old In Poetry

October 12, 1992

It was no coincidence that the Swedish Academy, just days before the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World, announced that West Indies poet Derek Walcott had won the Nobel Prize in literature.

In Mr. Walcott, the Swedish Academy has found a happy confluence of the new and old orders on the quincentennial of the first meeting of those two worlds.

Mr. Walcott has spent his adult life examining that confluence in Western poetry set in the Caribbean. He blends the vernacular traditions of St. Lucia and Trinidad with grand Western literary sounds and styles. He sets his odes to an ebony Helen of Troy, Spanish conquistadors and mixed-race wanderers to the strains of patois Creole and classic couplets and quatrains.

He himself is what his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky calls "a genetic Babel" of Dutch, African, Anglo and other heritages. Or, as one of Mr. Walcott's own characters said:

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation According to one colleague, history will judge Mr. Walcott as ranking up there with another man who mingled the West and the Caribbean. Mr. Brodsky said about the West Indies, "They were discovered by Columbus, colonized by the British and immortalized by Walcott.